Garmin 910XT Instant Pace Bug Current Pace Workarounds

Even with the 910’s latest firmware (v3.0 at the time of writing) the 910XT does not properly show instant pace in run mode. Here are the only workarounds.

Many people don’t know why instant pace is that important to others – but it is. Simply put, if you are 800m through a 1km interval and you have averaged 4:00/km but are targetting 3:55/km then do you need to speed up or slow down? (The answer, if you think about it, is that you can’t say as you need to know how fast you are CURRENTLY going.

Workarounds:

1. Change to bike mode and then change back. This resets the instant pace bug. – SORRY THIS IS RUBBISH. It doesn’t work.

2. Change AUTOLAP to a shorter distance and then use the average lap pace as a proxy for INSTANT PACE. I tried this for 0.5km and it was not effective. IF you change it to 15 seconds (say 0.1km) then it might work, I would guess that 1 minute/3-400m wouldn’t work. The problems with this method are – The vibrate and beep functions for autolap need to be turned off. – Your proper lap pace that you really want eg per mile or per km will now not work. I need lap pace and instant pace, so that won’t work for me. But it might for you.

3. You can change how you train and use virtual pacer to determine whether to speed up or not. Probly wouldn’t work for ANY kind of interval.

4. Buy a footpod (Garmin 010-10998-00 and 010-11092-00). This works! You have to properly calibrate the footpod and you have to tell the 910 to use the footpod as the source of speed and not the GPS. When you do this the 910 still records GPS points so software like SPORTTRACKS will use the GPS points for pace. That’s probably all OK. The one downside, apart form the cost of another bit of kit, is that you might need to calibrate the footpod for different speeds of training. You can turn the GPS off if you want to and then I guess SPORTTRACKS would use the footpod data for speed. You’ll have to test that yourself if it’s important to you. The footpod will also give you running cadence and steps and indoor/treadmill stats…cool!

I recently re-calibrated my footpod prior to a 5k parkrun – the 5th km beeped 5m before the line…I’ll take that for accuracy.

5. Wait until Garmin introduce a new metric such as AVG-PACE-15secs – something like this might be the technical solution as Garmin obviously have a problem with fixing the underlying problem. This is a workaround for Garmin to do.

6. Or Garmin could introduce a metric INSTANT-POD-PACE but I would imagine it would be technically too difficult to display that with a GPS-based lap pace.

7. Wait until Garmin fix it. Take a deep breath and…..hold it.

Summary: Buy an expensive Garmin footpod. If you can’tafford it or don’t want to their are other slightly cheaper brands. The autolap workaround might help a bit but introduces other annoyances.

If you have any further information to add please let me know either by email or as a comment below. Thank you.

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It’s a shame that a watch that costs upwards of £300 requires an additional bit of (expensive) kit to be purchased in order for me to know how fast I’m running!
Also the fact that I can’t recalibrate the altitude without restarting my session makes me wish I’d stuck with my Forerunner 305.